Policy excellence 1

I today’s media saturated age, it’s difficult to know what “politics” really means anymore. Is it elections? Is it government institutions? Is it a TV debate? What politics should constitute is the study of rightly ordered personal relationships, but despite all the expended argument, emotion, and “rationality,” it seems that things are getting worse rather than better. Pick your measure—government debt, crime, mental health, graduation rates, environmental degradation, nuclear proliferation—the trend seems to be in the wrong direction. How could so much time, money, education, and energy be expended with such piddling results? This is the fundamental question behind this blog, what I call the policy problématique. That is, how can we move from what we have, policy failure to policy excellence.

But is the term “policy failure” too harsh? Is it, in today’s vernacular, unfair? If it evaluated in terms of pursuing actions with the plan of achieving intended and desirable results, then in too many instances it is all too accurate. Much of the reason has to do with they pay politics is pursued and scored. It is based on persuasion rather than accuracy; on the short rather than long-term; on emotion rather than logic; on simplicity rather than complexity. In other words, we no longer pursue ethics traditionally understood; we pursue the advertising ethic which holds that, “The truth is that which sells.”

The argument proceeds by recognizing that politics is complex. So far as the policy problématique is concerned, the difficulty of pursuing courses of action that achieve their intended effects is driven by the complex of system being influenced. Were the system simple, then the consequences could be easily predicted. However a complex, social system yields unintended consequences. Achieving policy excellence therefore requires addressing, acknowledging, and accounting for the complexity of social systems. The question is, how best to do this? The current answer is democracy, having people vote and the majority rules. We live in a democratic age, and this seems so normal, so right, so stable, and so reified that how could it be any other way? However, Tocqueville pointed out the costs of democracy and noted that in a democratic society, it is difficult to imagine anything else. Moreover, once the majority have pronounced their judgment on an issue, it is absolute. But democracy need not be reified because, as Herbert Simon points out, there are multiple ways to reach policy decisions. The most important thing, recognizing the complexity of social systems, is to find a way to address the complexity. Democracy is naturally flawed because the very notion of complexity is measured against the well-known limitation of human rationality. So fundamental is this limitation that Simon coined the term bounded rationality to describe it. The key problem with democracy is that it is fundamentally driven by a collection of limited human brains, and increasing their number can help but ultimately brains will not do what they cannot do. Also, in a media age, there is an argument to be made that increasing that democracy results in demonstrably worse policy outcomes.

So how can the complexity of social systems be addressed? Recognizing the cognitive limitations associated with bounded rationality, it is natural to seek a cognitive prosthetic—that is, a way to supplement and assist the brain, and one way to do that is through a computer. Three challenges and observations immediately present themselves. First, how does one actually execute computer-based policy, both the creation of the computer model and its implementation within an organization? Second, pushing some of the decision making responsibility to a computer works against the democratic ethic, which, because it has devolved in the advertising ethic, is actually beneficial from a policy excellence perspective. Third, recall that the genius of The Constitution was a stepping back in 1787 from the ineffective Articles of Confederation which had been in place since 1776. So perhaps, what is being recommended here, is correcting a political system that has been pushed out of balance by information technology—that is, today’s media—with the application of another technology, the computer-aided quantitative analysis.